The eight articles published here represent the selected proceedings of the conference held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005, under the auspices of the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music, to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn Bartholdy). As conference organizer I was deeply gratified by the list of speakers and papers we were able to assemble for the conference programme. The conference also featured two concerts given by Françoise Tillard (pianoforte) with Erika Klemperer (violin) and Robert Max (cello), performing piano and chamber works of Fanny Hensel; and April Fredrick (soprano), with Briony Williams accompanying, in lieder of Fanny Hensel and her circle. Peter Ward Jones (Music Librarian, Bodleian Library, Oxford) arranged and introduced an exhibition of materials from the Bodleian's Mendelssohn collection as part of the conference. The opportunity to achieve a close concentration of attention on Fanny Hensel provided by the event is now further developed in the proceedings published in this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review.

This paper originated in the keynote address delivered at the Fanny Hensel bicentenary conference organized by the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music and held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005. As its title suggests, it marks a quarter-century acquaintance with Fanny Hensel. Although in recent years my research has expanded into opera on film, and that has obviously taken me into very different terrain, still Hensel continues to exert a special fascination. Preparing the edition of her letters to Felix Mendelssohn brought me into her private world, a world she assumed would remain private. I came to admire, and even love, her intelligence, her wit and her musical sophistication. It is not unusual for researchers to be enthusiastic about the person they are studying or to identify with them – this may be one reason for choosing that person in the first place, and is undoubtedly a reason why we chose to celebrate Fanny Hensel's bicentenary with the Oxford conference. In short, Fanny Hensel fascinates us.

Clara Schumann, née Wieck (1819–1896), and Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1805–1847), were among the outstanding women musicians of their time. Both kept diaries that still exist, and from these we can learn a great deal about the inner and outer lives of the two women. Fanny Hensel's diaries were originally used by her son Sebastian for his book Die Familie Mendelssohn, 1729–1847. He gave us her life story as seen through his eyes, and furnished the major information available about his mother until the recent publication of her diaries: Fanny Hensel, Tagebücher. This book was based on the diary manuscripts acquired by the Mendelssohn Archive of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek in 1969, 1970 and 1999. Fanny Hensel's Tagebücher cover the years 1829 to 1847, thus from the year of her marriage to the year of her death.

In her article ‘The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel’, Nancy Reich draws attention to the significance of social station as a constraint on Fanny Hensel’s musical career. While she acknowledges the existence of other barriers (such as religion, family traditions, and the influence on the Mendelssohns of Enlightenment philosophy), Reich emphasizes the role of contemporary expectations for upper-class women in limiting the scope of Hensel’s public musical activity. The identification of the ‘power of class’ as a factor in the careers of nineteenth-century women composers is an important contribution that deserves further investigation. Reich suggests a productive avenue for the exploration of this topic when she briefly compares Hensel’s career to those of two pianist-composers of lower social standing: Clara Schumann and Marie Pleyel. In this article, I pursue this avenue by comparing Hensel's career to that of another contemporary woman composer of a class lower than hers, namely Josephine Lang.

The bicentenary year of Fanny Hensel's birth generated a welcome degree of renewed attention to her life and music. Viewing these against the backcloth of debates about the relationships between women and the culture to which they contribute (and which they also consume) suggests a tension between, on the one hand, the image of a female composer in conflict with a patriarchal order and, on the other hand, the impression of a composer for whom considerable creative power lay in the cultural environment that she inhabited. While it is true that Hensel faced social and cultural barriers because of her sex, in order to understand her music it is essential that we consider the ways in which she could be seen to overcome those barriers, or even destroy them, through the expression of her personal voice in her compositions. Hensel's life demonstrates how closely bound up together biography and aesthetics really are. The way in which her life is portrayed can be seen to colour listeners' judgement of her music.

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

At first glance, Fanny Hensel's Andante espressivo in A♭ major – the first of the Vier Lieder für das Pianoforte op. 6, published in June 1847 just weeks after her death – impresses as a concise example of a textless, nocturne-like song cut from the cloth of her short piano character pieces and occasionally, but just occasionally, reminiscent of her brother's more celebrated Lieder ohne Worte. The 61 bars of the Andante show the gifts of an accomplished songwriter as they unfold an uninterrupted, ‘singing’ soprano melody, at times euphonious and lyrical, at times poignant and passionate, above a gently rippling accompaniment of arpeggiated triplets. The basic structure of the composition is clear enough. We hear in succession: 1) the melody in the tonic and a modulation (10 bars) to 2) a statement on the dominant (13 bars); 3) a retransition and dominant pedal point (9 bars) leading to 4) the return of the opening in the tonic (16 bars), further supported by 5) a coda, drawn once again from the melody (13 bars). The compositional plan is thus one of statement, departure and return, a familiar sequence Hensel employed in the majority of her short piano pieces, and yet a deceptively simple strategy that afforded her considerable latitude, within the circumscribed, epigrammatic realm of the piano miniature, to explore a wide emotional range of colours, textures and musico-poetic ideas.

In my experience, everyone among my acquaintances, friends, family members, students and colleagues who has encountered Fanny Hensel's ‘Song without Words’ [Song for Piano] op. 8, no. 1 in B minor, has recognized its special character – perhaps responding above all to its sense of ‘multum in parvo’, or ‘much in a small space’. This article offers some reflections on what it is that makes this piece so special and gives it this particular effect. As well as paying attention to the patterns, relationships and textures created by the notes, it seeks to suggest that one way of ‘reading’ the music may lie in its author's personality and circumstances.

We are accustomed to seeking the ‘music itself’ in the musical text. The actual and spiritual spaces that are inscribed in music, and the people connected to these sites, are thereby in danger of being left out of consideration. In my view, place and people are part of the music. It is thus against a background of an understanding of music that does not only mean the opuses in the sense of the written musical texts, but also implies all aspects of life connected with the production, reproduction and reception of music, that I offer this enquiry into the meaning of the Leipziger Straβe Drei for the artistic works emanating from Fanny Hensel.